The “Biggest Problem”

The biggest problem in the carpet industry is not installation.

Surprised? Most of us have had it hammered into us for decades that installation-related problems make up the largest number of complaints. Even if that statistic is true, does it tell the whole story?

I’ll argue that it doesn’t. A significant percentage of installation failures happen, not because the workmanship is faulty, but because the installation system is wrong for the job. A lot of the shabby-looking carpet whose appearance is blamed on poor maintenance never had a chance because it was the wrong carpet for the application.

What’s gone wrong in a lot of these cases is specification. Not only that the wrong carpet was chosen, but that the whole process by which carpet is specified is fundamentally broken. More precisely, specification is backwards — literally backwards — and that results in more lost years of use than any other category of problem.

That, I believe, is the biggest problem in the carpet industry.

What is Specification?

Specification is choosing the right product for the job. It is the process of identifying products and/or product characteristics required to meet the needs of a particular application. What’s often missing is how (or whether) the needs of a job are identified.

Carpet is rarely specified by subject-matter experts. The role of “specifier” is usually filled by architects, designers or salespeople who, for all their considerable talents, don’t usually know enough about how and why things go wrong with carpet to cover all the bases of specification. Things gets missed, assumptions are made, and stuff goes expensively wrong.

When carpet performs badly, inspectors rarely conclude that a defect is to blame. That because it’s pretty unusual to see a performance failure actually caused by something having gone wrong in manufacturing. To be clear, there are manufacturing defects that cause poor performance. Poor yarn processing, poor lamination and bad dyeing are a few that come to mind. However, actual defects like those, while they do occur, constitute a pretty small minority of performance failures.

Rather than point to some defect, inspection reports often conclude with something that sounds like, “The performance exhibited by this carpet is consistent with the characteristics of it’s construction, components and the use and maintenance conditions under which it is installed.” Those words are a long-winded way of saying that, while the carpet’s performance may indeed be poor, its not abnormal. Another way to say it is “the carpet is performing as would be expected.”

As would be expected?? By who?? (That’s how the angry phone call sounds.) Obviously not the buyer. If they expected the carpet to perform the way it did, they wouldn’t have complained. So something did go wrong, and that’s what this article is about.

Defining Performance

Ask ten people to define performance and you’ll get ten different answers. To one, performance may mean having outstanding resistance to staining or color loss; to another it may mean texture or pattern retention; or the ability to disguise the visibility of traffic paths; or high tuft-bind and delamination strength; or any combination of these or other characteristics.

With such varied criteria, it would seem nearly impossible to formulate a universally applicable definition of performance. It might be easier to describe what it isn’t — crushing and distortion of the pile in traffic paths, loss of physical strength under use, loss of texture, color or pattern definition, and so on.

Carpet performance may be divided into two broad categories:

1. Appearance Retention: The ability of the carpet to retain its original appearance for as long as possible; and

2. Physical Durability: The ability of the carpet as a whole to withstand use, maintenance and environmental conditions without losing its physical integrity.

In other words, performance can be defined as the ability to withstand use and maintenance while retaining physical integrity and minimizing changes in appearance.

What Determines Performance

A carpet’s performance will always be determined by three things:

1. The Product: Not only the carpet itself, but the floor covering system as a whole. The product includes the carpet, installation method, cushion, adhesives, edge treatments, etc.

2. The Use Conditions: The use and abuse the carpet sustains; that is, the volume, type and concentration of traffic and soiling.

3. The Maintenance: Maintenance includes preventative steps like well-maintained track-off mats and protective mats under castor chairs, as well as regular vacuuming and professional cleaning.

It’s helpful to think of these three factors — product, use and maintenance — as shown in the illustration below. The effects of use must be balanced by proportional maintenance, and the product must be able to withstand both use and maintenance.

In the absence of an actual manufacturing defect, a carpet’s performance will always be determined by these three factors; so, considering those factors, it will always be normal. Normal is not always the same as good.

How Specification is Backwards

You’ve heard over and over that residential carpet is selected for color and cost. That’s generally not far from reality. Nor is it much different from how the commercial world works.

It typically goes something like this:

• The project designer is focused on the aesthetic requirements of the project, selecting finish materials that work together to create an indoor environment with the right look and feel. Carpet competes for attention with hard surface floor coverings, wall coverings, upholstery, window treatments, even ceilings. Use conditions are given only cursory consideration, if any, and are often ignored altogether.

• Installation contractors prepare proposals, which may include their recommendations for carpet and/or installation method.

• Maintenance requirements are never discussed, or at best, they’re selected based on something someone heard might be right for this type of carpet. In exceptional cases the carpet manufacturer’s boiler-place cleaning recommendations are given to the buyer, who files them away and forgets about them.

• The carpet is installed and everyone and hopes it works. People point fingers randomly if (when) it doesn’t.

A Better Way

1. First, assess use conditions. Of the three factors determining performance, use is the one you have the least control of. Look at the volume, type and concentration of traffic each area will receive. Pivoting traffic? Rolling traffic? High-heel traffic?

Look at soiling conditions. What color is the soil? Red? Brown? Gray? Any carpet cleaner in the area can tell you — or show you, if you like — the color of the local dirt. If it’s a replacement, clean the existing carpet and look at what comes out of it. Is it prone to oily soil, food or drink spillage? Is it a restaurant, bar or ski lodge? If so, the carpet is going to spend a lot of time wet. In ski lodges, the trafficked areas may be wet all season.

2. Next, think about maintenance. It may seem weird to think about how we’re going to maintain carpet we haven’t even selected yet. Don’t we want to chose the carpet based on the use conditions? Yes, we do, but that’s not all. We need to think about maintenance before we choose the carpet.

Think about this: Is the purpose of maintenance to avoid damaging the product or to counteract the effects of use? Obviously, maintenance must not harm the carpet, but that’s not the reason you do it. You do it to counterbalance the effects of use, to keep the carpet clean and in good condition for as long as possible. That’s why we want to look at the use conditions and decide what kind of maintenance will be required, so we’re not throttled by what the product can withstand.

The idea is to avoid putting the professional cleaner in a position where he thinks, “Well, the carpet really needs such-and-such kind of maintenance, but I can’t. My hands are tied because of the limitations of what this carpet can withstand.” That’s why we want to think about maintenance before choosing the product.

3. Now you’re ready to think about the product. Finally! Remember, the product includes not just the carpet and its face fibers, backing materials and laminates, but whole installation system. You must select a product that can withstand both the use conditions and the maintenance the job requires. (Now, aren’t you glad you thought about all that dirt and traffic first?)

Future articles in this series will get into the nuts and bolts of product selection.

Case Studies Revisited

As you might expect, the carpet in Grauman’s Chinese Theater got really dirty, really quickly. It was going to require frequent, thorough, hot water extraction cleaning to keep pace with the incoming soil and junk food spillage.

Unfortunately, the first time the cleaner tried that, the water ran to the back (polypropylene doesn’t suspend water in the pile as well as more absorbent fibers like nylon), the adhesive holding the carpet to the cushion softened, the jute swelled, the carpet shrank and the installation failed spectacularly. By the next morning, the carpet had shrunk almost two percent in the length, pulling away from the walls as much as eight inches.

What an awful combination of circumstances. I’d be hard-pressed to come up with anything else they could have done to make it worse. Installed it upside-down, perhaps.

Now the cleaner isn’t totally off the hook, because he would have seen this perfect storm brewing if he’d carefully inspected the job first. But that’s not the point of the story. The point is that the cleaning method was absolutely correct for the use conditions, but it was disastrously wrong for the product. That carpet, in that installation system, was doomed because it was not possible to maintain it in a way appropriate for the use conditions. If the maintenance requirements had been considered beforehand, a different carpet and installation system would certainly have been selected.

What about the law office? It was a commercial-grade carpet installed over what could be called a commercial grade cushion. But this was an office with more than 150 people, 70 of whom were women in high heels. High heels are incredibly destructive. In stretched-in installations, every step stretches the carpet’s back beyond its ability to recover. (In the days before polypropylene backings, double-jute backs were simply punctured.)

Additionally, the library had constant rolling traffic from carts laden with hundreds of pounds of books. There also were rolling chairs behind every desk with no protective mats underneath.

Installed the way it was, and under those use conditions, that carpet never had a chance.

So the first installation failed. It rippled severely and became delaminated throughout the traffic paths. Seams failed everywhere. So everyone did the least logical thing possible: They replaced it with exactly the same thing. And it failed again.

If the use conditions had been assessed from the start, or at least before they tried their luck the second time, the failure never would have happened.

And if you’re wondering who got stuck with the bills (both of them) for that disaster, you can bet it wasn’t an office full of attorneys.

Finding a single foreign fiber in half of the spots wasn’t likely a coincidence, so the key was to:

1. identify the foreign fibers;
2. prove that the fibers were bleeding; and
3. determine where the fibers came from.

Fiber Identification

Under a microscope the fibers had the scaled appearance that is characteristic of hair fibers. (Figure 1.) They dissolved in sodium hypochlorite, so they were definitely hair fibers of some sort.

Hair fibers could have come from any number of sources — cashmere sweaters, wool socks, a scarf. But these were too big to have come from clothing, so the first thing that occurred to me was humans. After all, it was California and they had two teenagers (who had hair), so the first thing I asked was whether anyone in the house had or had ever had pink or purple hair. Seemed like a logical enough question. The homeowner assured me that everyone’s hair color was natural. My first guess appeared to be wrong.

So far we only know what general category of fiber it is — some kind of hair — but not where it came from. That could be impossible to find. It could have been a neighbor’s hair or clothes. But it also could have been an area rug, and they happened to have a very nice woven wool area rug in a tile-floored dining area adjacent to the kitchen.

The rug had a dark burgundy border — so dark that individual fibers appeared black. It shed readily just by brushing a hand over it. Of all the colors in the rug, only the burgundy yarn exhibited such extreme shedding. The released fibers were quite short and generally looked like the ones found in the pink spots. The fibers also had scales and dissolved in sodium hypochlorite.

We’ve got a bleeder!

At this point it looks like the rug is the source of the fibers. But could the bleeding be reproduced?

The dark fibers from the carpet bled readily when placed on filter paper with a drop of ammonia. They bled less with water, even less with acetic acid, and not at all with acetone or mineral spirits. Sample fibers from the rug behaved the exact same way.

Getting Around

Unlike clothing fibers, carpet fibers are too big to stay airborne and drift around the house. They were probably tracked around the home by foot traffic.

The fibers apparently were removed from about half of the spots by vacuuming after cleaning. The remaining fibers were solidly tangled among the carpet fibers and wouldn’t come out with vacuuming.

Fortunately the rug had not been placed directly on the carpet, in which case the bleeding would have been horrendous (though probably easier to figure out).

Cased Closed

It was fortunate that the carpet in one bedroom was not cleaned, because it provided a good view of what the cleaner would have seen (and not seen) before cleaning. The wool fibers were there, but they simply weren’t conspicuous enough to notice on a pre-cleaning inspection.

The homeowner was surprisingly rational about the whole thing. She recognized that it wasn’t the cleaner’s fault. The last I heard was that she was going to look into whether her homeowners insurance would cover replacement, or at least correction.

About 250 square yards of an off-white BCF nylon frieze was installed throughout a large, single-family home in Southern California. The carpet was about one year old and had just been cleaned for the first time.

I was contacted by the cleaner, who cleaned the carpet with a truck-mounted hot water extractor, and whom the homeowner was preparing to sue for damage she felt was caused by his cleaning.

Initially I spoke with the homeowner by telephone, who explained that hundreds of small, bright pink spots appeared the morning after the carpet was cleaned. Both she and the cleaner were sure that the pink spots had not been there before cleaning. The carpet in one of the upstairs bedrooms, which was not cleaned, was not affected.

Inspection revealed exactly what the cleaner and homeowner had described — hundreds of small, pink spots, each about 1/4 to 3/8 inch across. They were irregularly-shaped, not round like a drip, and appeared to be more or less randomly distributed throughout the home. They were not concentrated in traffic paths and they did not occur in any discernible pattern. However, they were absent underneath furniture, such as sofas, that sat down flush on the carpet, despite the fact that the furniture was moved for cleaning.

The home was occupied by two adults and two children in their late teens. There were no pets and, aside from these weird spots, the home was immaculate.

The pink coloration was confined to the upper half of the pile, mostly at or close to the surface. None appeared at the base of the pile. In cleanability tests using an alkaline detergent solution, the pink spots showed some transfer to a white cotton towel. They showed very little transfer with an acidic detergent, and no transfer with any solvents.

By this time things weren’t looking very promising for the cleaner. He acknowledged that the spots weren’t there before he cleaned it, but he said that he had not seen them after cleaning either. Unfortunately, they were everywhere he cleaned and they weren’t found where he didn’t clean.

Now, this cleaner was no amateur — he’s an IICRC-certified Master Cleaner. He happened to be a personal acquaintance, and I knew him well enough to know that he showed meticulous attention to detail and knew what he was doing. He took excellent care of his equipment and kept it in good working condition. As far as he knew, he’d never had mysterious pink spots appear before. But hey, accidents happen, and if this was his fault that’s exactly what I’d tell him.

One more detail: After staring at these spots for a while, I noticed that about half of them had a single thick, black fiber about 3/8 to 1/2 inch long in the center. Like the spots, these black fibers were also located near the surface of the pile and did not extend down to the carpet’s back.

So, with the cleaner on the hook for $7,000 worth of new carpet, what do you do next?